Because there aren't enough goddamn blogs on education.
Tom Bennett, founder of researchED, author, and behaviour advisor to the DfE writes the words the spirit animals tell him to, here.

Thursday, 25 April 2013

Fury as Gove admits 'he likes teachers'. The speech to the NCTL

Well, here are some quotes nobody expected from Michael Gove:

'I’m a great fan of Andrew Old, whose brilliant blog Scenes from the
Battleground provides one of the most insightful commentaries on the
current and future curriculum that I’ve ever read; but I’m also an
admirer of John Blake of Labour Teachers, who has transcended party
politics to praise all schools which succeed for their pupils, even if
they are academies or free schools…'

This is exactly how it must have played in the DfE last week:

Then this:

'I also hugely enjoy the always provocative work of Tom Bennett, the
Behaviour Guru, who champions teachers at every turn while challenging
them to up their game.'

By which point this is me:

Next time I get stopped for driving drunk with my knees at the wheel
on the M11 I'm pulling a Reese Wetherspoon, throwing a copy of this speech at the Feds and shouting 'Have you read THIS?'

Got
home from a busy day releasing butterflies from children's hearts, to
find that Michael Gove had mentioned my unworthy self and several others
in his address to the National College of Teaching and Leadership. I'm
not going to be cool and pretend it's anything other than plusgood
because it wasn't so long ago that I was plugging into my first blog and
wondering how you got anyone to read the damn things. The temptation to
style it out with a casual shrug and play the demagogue is an itch that
chafes my contrary nature.

I was asked if I thought it
was a good thing, to be thought well by an an SoS, and I realised what a
double-edged butter knife of Brutus recognition by the Alpha class can
be. Some rakes suggested it was done with political purpose, and my
weary inner inquisitor thought, 'What isn't?' Politics is a Hall of
Mirrors, of appearance, semblance, and the semblance of semblance,
regressing into infinity. And sometimes it's just appearance. Who knows?
Speculation about the interior lives of others I'll leave to
psychologists and other clairvoyants.

It was reassuring
to see DJ Gove dropping shout-outs to voices from the Cursed Earth of
education, like Daisy Christodolou, the anonymous Old Andrew
(brilliantly referred to as Andrew Old: 'To you, Mr and Mrs Old, a
son'), David Weston, Matthew Hunter and others. These people are in it
for the love, plugging away, saying what they believe like John the
Baptist without the locusts and honey (apart from Andrew). Not me. I get
a pound for every word I write. I just gave Paul McCartney money for
the meter.

I often hear that teachers are constantly
battered as a profession. I think the reality isn't quite the match of
the charge sheet; the principal culprits, if any, are a handful of
journalists trying to plug into the Zeitgeist and blowing everyone's
fuses for shits and giggles, hits and headlines. At the least (and here I
lay myself open to accusations of playing the dupe) was a speech aimed
at the back of the stalls and the upper circles. It was the equivalent
of Justin Bieber lolloping out on to the stage of Wembley and shouting
'I love London' as Twitter creams and palpitates.

Some
of the more social-collectively minded of the named elect will probably
have some explaining to do at tomorrow's breakfast table ('So, WHAT do
you call THIS then? Who have you been talking to on that social platform
when we've been out campaigning for oppressed centaurs?'), but I have
no figs to give. My house allegiances are long gone, like tears in the
rain, Deckard. I've been called a bleeding heart and a bully, and it
stopped meaning anything to me years ago. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of the enemy are deadly, goes the proverb. Worst dating advice ever.

The
story the papers are running with is, of course, Gove's thoughts on the
creation of a Royal College of Teaching- which needs a blog in itself,
and not the vanity of a handful of bloggers. Appropriately enough, Gove
says:

'The creation of a Royal College is not DfE policy - on the contrary,
I’ve had nothing whatever to do with it - which is why it’s such a good
idea. Now, I realise that any endorsement from me might blight its chances before it even gets off the ground'

Some
of the teachers he names might feel the same. Maybe it is just a ploy
to sweeten the profession. If he announces tomorrow that the Tech Bacc
has a 'kids up chimneys' component, I could be convinced that we were
being softened up for bad news.

I won't let this
change me. Kids at school are the most effective humility bomb you'll
ever encounter. I've just got over them finding out my book was called
Behaviour Guru, which is like painting a target on my ass, and rightly
so.

2 comments:

Do you think Gove actually reads blogs or does he get one of his £1000-a-day SpAds to summarise them for him? He's surely too busy using his intuition to dream up new education policies to read anything.